How rugby coach Ben Ryan ditched England machine for Fiji sevens heaven

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Will Macpherson1 June 2018

“As a coach, my philosophy is that you should make yourself redundant,” says Ben Ryan. “That’s the dream.”

To hear Ryan appearing to write off his craft confuses. Then again, he is no ordinary coach. “You should get your team to the point where you are not needed,” he adds. “You want to head to the stands, have a beer and let them get on with it. They know what they’re doing.”

That was the condition Ryan’s Fiji sevens team found itself in by the time they thrashed Great Britain for gold at Rio in 2016, the nation’s first Olympic medal. After almost three tumultuous years in the job, he felt more relaxed there than at almost any other game.

“I didn’t need to be there,” he says. Fiji scored in the first minute and won 43-7.

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The road there was not smooth, as he charts in his book Sevens Heaven, which is out now. It began with him learning about the job on Twitter, flying to Fiji, meeting the bankrupt board, not being paid for six months and the players not talking to him for three.

Along the way he encountered a murderer, severe poverty, natural disaster and endless politics and corruption. It is an engrossing account of a remarkable story. At the end of it all, he tells Standard Sport, “I came back a totally different bloke.”

Ben Ryan arrives at a welcome party for Fiji's Olympic gold-medal-winning men's seven team in 2016
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The book opens with a description of the risk taking the job represented. After six years as England sevens coach, the love for his work had gone.

His last game was the final of the 2013 Sevens World Cup in Russia, the first time England had reached that stage in 20 years. “I felt nothing, no excitement or joy when we won the semi, which was a great achievement,” he says.

“I wasn’t happy with me. I had arrived a sharp knife, a creative coach, but I felt blunted as I became part of the machine at Twickenham. England wore me down. I made enemies of my bosses because I questioned them.”

Ryan describes sevens as “chronically undervalued” here and believes England’s 15s team would be vastly improved if more of them had played it.

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Fiji offered escape. “It was just blind faith at the time,” he says. “I immediately realised that Fijian Rugby could not be more different to the RFU. The headquarters are this old, wooden colonial building, but it sums things up. Beautiful outside, chaos inside. Beautiful chaos. Early on, I wondered what the hell I was doing, but I stuck at it.”

The challenges along the way were significant. Facilities were rudimentary. A “monumental” 44-0 win over New Zealand in Dubai in a tournament they won bought him respite from politics, while the players eventually started talking to him — but only when they learned he had not been paid a penny, months into the job.

He quickly learned how to communicate with them. Fijians, he says, “have incredible emotional intelligence, and say a lot with tells and cues. You can order a taxi with your eyebrows!”

A Fijian reacts during celebrations for their gold medal victory
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Ryan realised his team responded well to stories and songs. The one time he can remember getting angry with them, they made a song about it: Iron, Lion, Ben Ryan, borrowing Bob Marley’s tune. “They kept singing it! It’s hard to stay angry with people like that!”

Fijian teams were erratic, so Ryan asked why. He spotted their high-sugar diet, so banned sugar.

Carbs went, too, and with the Olympics as a common goal, the players bought into ideas alien to them. The end result, he says, was “sport at its purest. They were talented, athletic, enjoying themselves and laughing. It was a very special group.”

Ryan returned to London after Rio and is coaching and consulting. He could yet become general manager at Harlequins.

He has a tattoo on his wrist, which reads “Vei Lomani”, which means “Love One Another”.

“You see it every day there. It’s not your bank account that makes you happy. We all need to be more grateful.”

Sevens Heaven: The Beautiful Chaos of Fiji’s Olympic Dream by Ben Ryan is available now in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, price £20

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